DOSTOYEVSKY'S "Crime and Punishment" changed my life. It strengthened my resolve to be a writer and inspired me to learn Russian so I could read the novel in the original. But I never did. It had all stayed too fresh in memory. Finally, some 30 years later, in order to review these two new translations, I read it in Russian and was back in that world of dark staircases and ax murders. Of course, the original read at the age of 50 could never shake you like a translation read at 20.

Translations are never perfect, but they can be excellent. The work of translation is a series of thousands upon thousands of judgments. (The translators of the two new versions of "Crime and Punishment" -- David McDuff, a British poet and translator, and Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, who have previously collaborated on a version of "The Brothers Karamazov" -- differ even on how to spell the author's last name.) If those individual judgments are well made and well integrated, the result is a successful translation. As the number of gaffes and clunkers rises, however, the value of the translation declines, because each minor outrage breaks the spell that is literature.

There are all sorts of theories about translation, of course, but any good reader knows there are certain common-sense principles involved. Thought must resemble thought, speech must sound like speech, and a curse should be as real on the page as it is on your lips when you stub your toe badly.

Raskolnikov stands outside the pawnbroker's door, an ax inside his coat. In a moment he will put his theory -- that great men are exempt from morality -- into practice by bringing that ax down on the head of the old woman. As he is about to ring her doorbell, Raskolnikov thinks, in Mr. Pevear and Ms. Volokhonsky's translation: "Am I not pale . . . too pale?" "Am I not pale" is simply not the language of thought. Mr. McDuff's version has the ease of the natural: "Don't I look terribly . . . pale?" Constance Garnett's rendering early in this century was the simplest of all: "Am I very pale?"

Later on, Raskolnikov is revolted by his crime, though more by its banality than its criminality. In one of those self-lacerating torrents of consciousness that are a Dostoyevsky specialty, Raskolnikov exclaims: "Oh, the vulgarity of it! Oh, the baseness!" -- if we are to believe Mr. McDuff -- or "Oh, triteness! Oh, meanness!" if we are to credit Mr. Pevear and Ms. Volokhonsky. I cannot imagine a Russian murderer thinking: "Oh, triteness! Oh, meanness!" I cannot imagine anyone thinking it, for that matter. This sort of rendering betrays a lack of skill, ear and editor.

The word the translators have rendered as either "vulgarity" or "triteness" is "poshlost" in Russian, a word so rich that Vladimir Nabokov devoted 12 pages to it in his 155-page biography of Nikolai Gogol. In essence, "poshlost" denotes spiritual tackiness; it pains Raskolnikov more that he has proved to be mediocre, banal, even vulgar, than that he has taken life. Mr. McDuff's "Oh, the vulgarity of it! Oh, the baseness!" is certainly better than the Pevear-Volokhonsky version, but the two "Ohs" and the word "baseness" lend the line too antique a coloration.

Oddly enough, Garnett, translating in an era when "Ohs," one assumes, seemed less dated, chooses a different syntax entirely, one that is itself exclamation without first signaling that it is such. She says: "The vulgarity! The abjectness!" This also has the value of being concise. The other word Dostoyevsky used, engaging in a little alliteration, was "podlost," a more common word than "abjectness" ever was. This is one instance in which the problem has yet to be excellently resolved.

Words not only have meanings, but also histories of their own. Since 1866, when "Crime and Punishment" was published, some words have had fabulous careers and none more so than "glasnost." Though I knew the word had a long lineage, I was still startled to find it in "Crime and Punishment," where Dostoyevsky used it to refer to a historical phase already past. Garnett could not know the luster and connotation that the word "glasnost" would attain by now; she simply has Svidrigailov say "a few years ago, in those days of beneficent publicity. . . ." This is a version that has only lost meaning with time, as "publicity" has acquired shades that connect it more closely with "poshlost" than with making things public knowledge.

Here Mr. Pevear and Ms. Volokhonsky found a reasonable, if syntactically tinny, solution: "a few years ago, still in the days of beneficent freedom of expression." Mr. McDuff's version: "a few years ago, when we were still in the era of beneficent glasnost." That was bold on his part, but an error. Precisely because the word has such a long lineage in Russian, it should not bring the last seven years so vividly to mind -- Mikhail Gorbachev's birthmark, champagne on the Berlin wall. It would have been better covered in a note at this point, as Mr. Pevear and Ms. Volokhonsky chose to do.